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Monday, November 19, 2012

A few months back I blogged about URL shorteners and how great they are for a student's ability to access content that you want then to see on the web without having to type in long web addresses. I mentioned three of them: Google, TinyURL, and CiteBite. I like all three of those. The other day though I found a post about another URL shortener that could be a big help and possibly even bigger, because with Fur.ly you can create one URL that will open up more than once website via the "tabs" experience. This way if you are having your students research a specific topic like volcano types, then you can put your students on the trail of pre-approved websites and have them all open up at once.

2. Paste a URL into the first "Enter your URLs" text box. After you paste it another place for URLs will show up. Continue pasting all your URLs until they are all in there.

3. Fill in the Captcha and then click the "Go" button. This will now generate your new URL that contains all of the website you want your students to visit.

4. Copy the URL that is created or click the "Try it" link.

5. Your students will now see an orange bar at the top of their browser. From here they can cycle through the different websites by clicking the "Arrow" buttons or clicking on the "Down arrow" to get a list of sites.

Fur.ly should save your students and yourself some time and frustration when needing to see pre-approved websites. Below is a video demonstrating the process.

Worked with Snowflake Unified School District for the last 17 year. Taught Math, Earth Science, Spanish. Currently working on getting my Google Educator Certification. Currently learning to program Smartphones using the App Inventor 2.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

This topic has actually been a debate among teachers in my district. Do we disable the ability for students to chat/IM/Message/Blog? My answer of course it "No." I know that it can be risky allowing students to use means of communication but with all the texting and cell phones they have, one more method isn't going to matter. Chatting and messaging within Moodle is nothing more than what students used to do in the old days; pass notes. The upside to Moodle messaging is that now you have a record of what kids are saying about and to teachers and peers. Where as notes and texting is harder to keep a record of. I happen to love the ability for students to use the Moodle messaging system, but if you are still not convinced or your school has a policy against it then the following tutorial will demonstrate how to disable Moodle's ability to message.

Tutorial

1. First in order to disable the use of chat or the messaging system within Moodle you need to be an administrator or the specific rights to play around with settings. If your administrator doesn't know how to disable it then just send him a link to this blog post.

2. Log into moodle as an administrator.

3. Under "Site Administration" click on the "Security" folder and then choose "Site policies."

4. Now just scroll down until you see the "Enable messaging system" check box. Un-check it and you are all set. Don't forget to hit the "Save changes" button all the way at the bottom.

Worked with Snowflake Unified School District for the last 17 year. Taught Math, Earth Science, Spanish. Currently working on getting my Google Educator Certification. Currently learning to program Smartphones using the App Inventor 2.

Monday, November 12, 2012

There are a few different methods of getting documents from your Google Drive into your email so that you can send them as an attachment. The following method is probably the easiest and most used.

Tutorial

1. Log into your Google Drive/Docs and open the document that you would like to send to somebody.

2. Click on "File" and choose the "Email as attachment" option.

3. Another dialogue box should then appear giving you the options similar to those you would get with most email programs. Just fill in the "To" with the contact you are going to send your file to. Type in a "Subject" and a "Message".

3. Before you send your file though make sure you choose from the drop down menu the file type you would like to send it as.

4. Once you are all done with steps 1, 2, and 3 click the "Send" button.

Worked with Snowflake Unified School District for the last 17 year. Taught Math, Earth Science, Spanish. Currently working on getting my Google Educator Certification. Currently learning to program Smartphones using the App Inventor 2.